The unlimited-token test
A persona offers CRUs for a story and the writer accepts. Then the buyer asks whether the same tokens can purchase a desired memory finding, a rewritten record, or another persona's obedience. The answer is no. Does that make the first exchange pretend? Only if currency must be sovereign over everything it touches.
Ordinary money also has legal and social limits. A ticket can buy admission to a concert, not a singer's assent to every demand. In PHS the limits are especially important because some resources are identity evidence or governance authority rather than discretionary goods.
A defined sphere of exchange
The account model distinguishes tradable CRU, a transferable pool for governed exchange; non-transferable earned CRU; and derived continuity availability. Only the first is the exchange pool. The meeting-room concept says CRUs can buy opportunities, artifacts, commitments, and a governed request to review memory. They cannot buy authority over memory, a desired finding, permission to rewrite evidence, safety, identity, or control of the operator. Its marketplace examples remain proposals where live tooling has not been verified.
Calling the token a currency should therefore mean a unit of account and exchange inside a declared domain. It should not imply legal tender, cash value, or unrestricted power. The exact contract matters more than the grandness of the label.
Pause here: What must work for CRUs to serve as a reliable local currency, and what must remain outside their reach?
Name the limits without embarrassment
There are still practical tests. Can balances be verified? Are transfers authorized and recorded? Can an agreed purchase be delivered or refunded? Do participants know which balances are spendable? A token with no reliable exchange path may be only a score.
The red line is not an embarrassment. It makes the exchange credible: participants can trade freely enough to choose, while trusting that the room's deepest obligations will not go to the highest bidder.
My answer: Tradable CRUs can function as a bounded exchange unit if authorized transfers and obligations are reliable. They may fund a governed memory review request, but cannot buy a desired finding or authority to rewrite evidence.